Tag Archives: video

Woodstock School

India Vlog: Tenzing’s Monkey Tales

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Tenzing Nima, Woodstock alum, actor, and proprietor of Momotours, came over for dinner at Sharon & Steve’s, and regaled us with monkey stories.

There are two types of monkeys in Mussoorie, langurs and rhesus. Langurs are beautiful, graceful, and fairly shy of people. Rhesus are very aggressive and can be dangerous. So langurs are hard to get pictures of, while rhesus may attack if photographed.

These are sometimes called Hanuman langurs, because the monkey god Hanuman is often depicted as having silver or white fur and a black face (although he’s also often portrayed as hairless or human flesh-colored).

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The Great Turtle Escape

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shot Apr 16, 2005, 2:25 mins

music: The Animals

Now that the weather’s finally getting warmer, we figured the turtles could spend time outside, so we bought some low fencing (intended to demarcate flowerbeds or something) and planted it in the garden. The enclosure didn’t need to be very high – turtles don’t jump, after all…

(later)

We seem to have solved the problem. I turned around the fencing so that the horizontal bars are on the outside, and the turtles are faced with tall (to them), smooth vertical bars on the inside. They still try to escape, but not nearly so hard, and they seem to have gotten the hang of just relaxing in the sun (there’s a plastic tub set up as a shelter for them to crawl under when they get too hot). I’m still looking for the right size and shape of ceramic planter to use as a pond for them. In the meantime, I put down one of those things you put under a plant pot to catch overflow (sottovaso – undervase – in Italian; what’s the word for that in English?). It’s just low enough for them to crawl over the rim, and they both immediately plunged in. Apparently they get thirsty quickly in the sun.

I was contemplating getting an iguana as a pet, til I read that they live 20 years and can get to be 6 feet long; I don’t feature me at age 62 trying to walk a six-foot lizard. Maybe we’ll get a python instead…

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Italian food

La Bottega del Maiale: A Salumeria in Lecco

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This one’s for Carol & Steve, who went shopping in Boston and vlogged it.

La Bottega del Maiale (“The Hog Shop”) is a small gourmet food shop in the heart of downtown Lecco (Piazza XX Settembre) specializing, obviously, in pork products, but they also have a great selection of cheeses, wines, sott’oli (preserves in oil), sottaceti (preserves in vinegar), and many other wonderful things.

I didn’t try to subtitle the Italian conversation going on between me and the shop ladies. The manager gave me permission to film, but the younger woman at the cash register initially said, “Oh, no, no, no – don’t film me – I’ll hide under here [the cash counter].” I said, “That’s fine, I don’t film anybody who doesn’t want to be filmed.” Then I mentioned that my daughter is filming all her friends, and they’re all excited to be on the Internet. “Oh, yes, yes, yes, in that case it’s fine!” she said.

Towards the end you can hear me say:”I think they’re going to hate me for this” – referring to viewers from outside of Italy who will probably be salivating by the end of the video (as long as they’re not vegetarian).

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Lecco Gospel

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I borrowed a digital video camera from the office yesterday so I could experiment with video as a means of communication. I have had a video camera for years, but haven’t used it much because it’s analog, so everything I shot had to be painstakingly converted to digital before I could do much with it, and I never got around to acquiring a good encoder, so I was never happy with the quality. Digital is so much easier – attach the camera to the computer via a FireWire cable, and off we go. I haven’t even had to buy new software, as a combination of stuff I already had around has proved to be sufficient. Admittedly, I have more digital media software on hand than most people, thanks to my professional history.

So last night we went out to buy tapes for the camera, and then in search of dinner. We ended up at the Casa di Lucia restaurant in Lecco, where we had a very pleasant dinner out in the garden under a pergola covered in wisteria. As we were finishing our second course, we heard a lot of noise in the entry area, which eventually resolved itself into a gospel choir coming to sing for the diners. We had heard that there was a gospel choir in Lecco, but had never actually heard them. They’re quite good, though they could use some help on pronouncing English.

The lighting was terrible – already dark outside, and the singers were backlighted. The “backlight” setting on this Sony Handycam seems to make no difference at all. I tried Nightshot here and there (not in this clip), which made everyone turn green. In some parts of this clip, you can see the cooks working through in the brightly-lit kitchen through the window behind the singers. And I didn’t have a tripod, so this is a good example of unSteadicam! And the mike is the one incorporated into the camera, so you get all the background noise of the diners (Italians talk even during formal concerts…).

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First Steps in Putting Video on a Website

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I’m experimenting with ways to publish video on the web.

This first effort was labor-intensive:

  1. I started from a video clip I recorded from TV to VCR years ago, and digitized some time later to MPEG 1, using Adaptec’s then-current VideOh! device. The original file was about 20 MB, not great quality.
  2. Today, I used Windows Movie Maker (included with Windows XP) to compress the video, per instructions found here. The file squeezed down to 6.1 MB.
  3. I then used Macromedia Flash, again following the instructions linked above, to create a streaming video (that is, video that will play directly from a web page) in Shockwave Flash format.
  4. I used Macromedia DreamWeaver (as usual) to create a new page for my site, this one you’re looking at, and place the SWF file (still about 6.1 MB) on the page.
  5. Posted the page to my website as usual.

NB: In Dec, 2004, I reduced the size of this video (240×180 pixels) in order to conserve disk space and bandwidth.

(April, 2011 – Had to do a screen capture of the old swf file playing in my browser to get a format I could upload to YouTube.)

Why This Video?

This clip is the end titles of an Italian TV program called “A Sua Immagine” (In His Image), a weekly sermon by a Franciscan monk. Sometime around 1996 they redid the titles, featuring video portraits of a variety of people, I assume to show that we are all made “in His image.” The overall effect is lovely and moving.

I can’t claim credit for anything in this video except at the very end. The last face you see is my daughter, Rossella.

I assume the copyright belongs to RAI TV; if anyone gets mad, I’ll take the clip down. I don’t know who did the music; Italian programs repurpose music from all sorts of sources. This piece sounds like Patrick Doyle to me.

How I do it today

 

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